“My mother was a teacher, while my father, a provincial governor under the monarchy of Zahir Shah, introduced me to the works of Victor Hugo, in a house where there were always translations of Steinbeck and Virginia Woolf lying, and where everyone could recite a poem or sing.”Following the coup d’?t of 1973, however, in which the king was overthrown and Afghanistan declared a republic, Rahimi’s family began to fall apart. After studies at the Franco-Afghan lyc? he briefly joined his father in exile in Bombay. Returning shortly after the Soviet invasion of 1979, he read literature at the university of Kabul, and worked as a cinema critic. Called up for military service, he was offered an exemption, if willing to submit to the Soviet regime, which his elder brother was part of “I was offered a scholarship in Moscow,” he says. “But having a monarchist father and a communist brother made me something of an anarchist.
I had to find another destiny.”Which brings us to a mosque in the mountains in 1984, about a three-day walk from Pakistan “Including my future wife, there were 22 of us,” he says. “Robbed by f bandits, ill, the snow was so deep, the land so mined, we thought we were stuck till spring.” A mujahedin commander volunteered to take them “A very brave man,” he remembers. “He led on horseback, shooting with his Kalashnikov into the snow. ‘If a mine blows up, and I’m blown up,’ he said, ‘take another road’.”"We had to step into the prints his horse left behind Eventually we got to the border. The mujahedin said, ‘Before you, Pakistan, behind you, your country. Look on it for the last time.’ I looked back, our footprints in the snow as far as the eye could see Before us, a perfectly white landscape To me it was like a blank page. Like freedom.”For a month, he stayed in Pakistan, wondering whether to join the resistance He eventually applied for political asylum in France.
“If there was a communist terror at home, then in Pakistan I realised we had walked straight into our future, the religious terror of the Taliban.” Considering himself more a cultural refugee than a political one, he completed a doctorate in audio-visual communications at the Sorbonne, and began writing Earth and Ashes in 1996, partly in response to the new Taliban regime, partly to the news of his brother’s death. “My family, fearing I would try to avenge him, kept his murder a secret for two years,” he says. “It struck me that this culture of vengeance was the reason why, time and again, Afghanistan descends into new forms of violence. This refusal to mourn, always to seek vengeance without concession, meant that even as the Soviets withdrew, with one million dead behind them, we were fighting yet again.”An attempt to come to terms with this madness, Earth and Ashes is the tale of Dastaguir, an old peasant, as he leads his five-year-old grandson, Yassin, to the Russian-run coalmine where the latter’s father works. The boy, the only survivor of a Soviet bombing raid which killed his mother and grandmother, has been deafened by blast, but, as yet, does not understand why “stones have stopped making sound”. His father, groomed by the Soviets as a model worker, thinks the Mujahedin the culprits.The book is a parable of familial dysfunction, in which an ageing peasantry, confounded by a newly industrialised world, faces a future in which the children cannot hear. Rahimi has compressed 10 years of Soviet occupation into less than 60 devastating pages.
